"I hope you appreciate all I've done for you," Boyne went on. "If I had not risked all this, where would you have been—tried and executed in the hangman's noose. But I have done my best—though often you don't appreciate it."
"I—I do!" cried the voice from behind that strange disguise. "And I do all that you tell me," it whined.
"Very well," laughed Boyne. "We'll let it rest at that. The failure you lately had put me right in the cart. We mustn't have another. Remember that! Let it sink into your brain. You are clever, I know. But a single slip and both of us will go where we don't want to!"
"I know! I know! Yes—yes," replied the huddled figure. "But it was the weather—always the weather. And it is so hot under that roof."
"Weather be hanged!" replied Boyne. "This is winter—cold winter!—and yet you believe it to be summer."
As a matter of fact, it was hot summer weather, yet Boyne was trying to impress upon his companion that heat was cold, and vice versa.
The two weird figures in white cloaks, with only slits for the eyes, like Brothers of the Misericordia of Mediæval Italy, only in white, instead of black, sat opposite each other. Boyne was giving to his prisoner a breath of air, and a change in his living room.
A few minutes later the strange occupant of the locked room uttered the single word:
"Nibby?"
"Oh, yes, dear little Nibby is here," was Boyne's reply.